From County Wicklow to the world – Róisín Murphy is always on the move, forever in search of that feeling of “connection” she finds performing for an audience. “I‘ve been doing this a long time,” she says, “that connection can come and go throughout a gig, throughout a career – but when it’s in full connection mode... that’s what any performer lives for, I think.” It’s this that has powered Murphy through three decades in the industry, across countless different tour destinations and soon-to-be six solo studio albums. For our latest Dazed POV, we join the artist as she hops from Hungary to Germany, returning to Gräfenhainichen to play Melt festival, a personal favourite for its “incredible” landscapes and crowds.
“There are no two festivals that are the same, at least not in my experience,” says Murphy of what she loves about being on the road. Against a backdrop of Ferropolis open-air museum of industrial machines, here Murphy’s music comes to life in a performance described in her own words as “jagged, on the edge of disaster”, but also “very warm, open, and loving” made evident in her interactions with fans afterwards. Her commitment to entertaining is still visible in the bruise she sustained from the show before. She may have fallen, but as she captioned on social media after “SHIT HAPPENS” – all you can do is get back up again.
“It’s important to have fun on tour, to enjoy the people you’re with,” she’s learned over the years, forming familial bonds with her band and the wider circle of people involved in her productions. “Fader”, a taster track from her new project, with a self-directed video that returned to the streets of her hometown, Arklow, with Irish dancers, majorettes, Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, farmers and even a brass band from the community in tow, is a testament to this spirit. A deep appreciation of places and the people that make them what they are informs her creativity; her upcoming album Hit Parade an exercise in how she is able to bridge physical distance and form inspiring connections across, in this case, “the airspace between Hamburg and London” that separated her and collaborator DJ Koze.
Giving Koze space to do what he does best, to take “a deep dive into himself”, with the freedom to excavate each idea she left on their remote working music production software, the resulting record is “vibrant and alive”, confessional and “very sensorial”. ”I feel like you can see it, smell it, touch it, as well as hear it,” she says, “It’s a whole universe: you can dive in and fly around and have a look at all sorts of things.” For now, follow the artist on her Berlin adventure in our Dazed POV above, and sample the Hit Parade to come in the track below.
